Performance issues with iOS Safari

I’ve recently been having issues with YouTube videos in Safari (iOS 26.6). I normally use the YouTube web site in Safari instead of the YouTube app (because, let’s face it it’s terrible). But lately, the videos played via Safari will occasionally hang, and pressing Pause and then Play won’t resume playback. The only way to get the video to start playing again is to completely reload the page, which restarts the video at the beginning. Is anyone else having issues like this? The conspiracy theorist in me says that Google/Youtube is deliberately causing playback issues to force people to use the app (which does not have this issue).